First shots fired in anger

Gun battery at Gloucester Point

This May 1862 photograph shows the covering work of the Gloucester Point gun battery where Confederate artilllerymen had fired Virginia's first shots of the Civil War at the Union gunboat Yankee just the year before.

This May 1862 photograph shows the covering work of the Gloucester Point gun battery where Confederate artilllerymen had fired Virginia's first shots of the Civil War at the Union gunboat Yankee just the year before.

Three weeks after Virginia left the Union, the escalating shoving match between federal and Confederate forces jostling for control of Hampton Roads finally erupted into a shooting war.

Alarmed by the increasingly aggressive patrols of Union gunboats from Fort Monroe, the new Confederate government ordered a company of the Richmond Howitzers to rush to the old colonial-era earthworks at Gloucester Point.

Their guns had only been in place a few hours when the artillerists sent a shell across the bow of the USS Yankee, firing the first shots in defense of Virginia.

"All of our men were perfectly cool and collected during the whole of the firing," Private James Williams wrote, describing the May 7, 1861, engagement.

"I glory in the first shot in Virginia fired by the Howitzers and I helped to fire it."

Exactly who started the fight isn't completely clear from the record.

Union Lt. Thomas O. Selfridge Jr. -- who would not only fire the Union's first shots in Virginia but also serve aboard the first ship sunk by an ironclad, the first Union submarine and the first warship to be sunk by a torpedo -- reported that the Confederates initiated the action as he steamed about 2,000 yards from shore.

Most Southern accounts agree, though some describe the 148-foot-long tug and its two 32-pounder guns as the aggressor.

What's not disputed is the strategic impact of the Union navy at Fort Monroe -- and the Confederates' desperate efforts to offset that threat by building waterfront forts throughout South Hampton Roads and along the rivers leading to Richmond.

"The Union immediately recognized its advantage -- and immediately the Confederacy recognized its disadvantage," Civil War author and historian John V. Quarstein says.

"Fort Monroe gave the Union an anchorage for its fleet -- and it immediately began sending gunboats there to patrol down the rivers -- because the rivers are the way to Richmond."

So crucial was the defense of Norfolk and the Gosport navy yard in Portsmouth that the Confederacy detached famed railroad engineer Maj. Gen. Walter Gwynn -- who designed and constructed the Charleston batteries that bombarded Fort Sumter -- to lead the operation.

Within weeks, his forces had constructed a sweeping arc of defensive works that extended from Sewell's Point, Craney Island and Pig's Point to such westward points on the James River as Forts Boykin and Huger. The first three positions alone would eventually mount nearly 200 guns -- all taken from the armory at Gosport -- but not before Sewell's Point became the target of a May 18-19 bombardment by Union gunboats even before it was fully armed.

The defense of the York River was equally critical, especially after Selfridge and the Yankee -- on May 5 -- chased a local steamboat all the way to West Point without resistance. From there an existing railroad line could support a quick and possibly overwhelming attack on Richmond.

"Suppose they should send suddenly up the York River, as they can, an army of thirty thousand or more; there are no means at hand to repel them," wrote Rev. William Nelson Pendleton -- a West Point graduate and chief artillerist for classmate Robert E. Lee -- in an anxious letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

"It will be a severe, if not fatal blow."

Such dire fears explain why the Richmond Howitzers mounted two of their guns on the bow of the steamboat that ferried them from West Point to Gloucester.

They also underscore why -- when the artillerymen arrived at 11 p.m. on May 6 -- they found laborers straining in the dark to strengthen the old Revolutionary War water battery and the star-shaped hilltop fort that protected it from a land attack.

As he approached the next afternoon in the Yankee, Selfridge did not suspect the kind of resistance that had been absent just two days before.

"A shot across my bow first apprised me that the enemy had guns mounted," he reported.

In the clash that followed, the gunboat and water battery exchanged some 20 rounds, with the Union shells mostly falling short and Confederates' soaring overhead or dropping harmlessly in the river.

Though the Howitzers believed they hit the Yankee twice, Selfridge reported that he withdrew unharmed -- but not before sending a shot perilously close to Private Andrew Jackson of the Gloucester Invincible Blues.

"The very first shot, a 12-pounder from one of the enemy's guns, come very near to putting an end to my existence, as I was walking from the water battery to my command on the hill above," he later recalled.

Despite the Virginians' resistance, Selfridge returned to Fort Monroe convinced that Gloucester Point could be taken.

But the plans advanced by his commander for a quick naval and amphibious assault languished in Washington, D.C., so long that the fortification grew into a formidable roadblock -- and a crucial anchor of the Warwick River defensive line that protected the Peninsula and the James and York rivers.

"Some of the big Union warships -- like the Cumberland -- could have taken that fort early on -- and it controlled the back door to Richmond," Gloucester historian Ben Harris says.

"That might have ended the whole thing extremely quick. But they never came."

Determined to protect the York River approach that both North and South saw as a potential back door to Richmond, Virginia artillerymen at Gloucester Point fired the state's first shots of the Civil War in response to a May 7, 1861 incursion by the federal gunboat USS Yankee. Both sides recognized...

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